PURPOSE BEYOND REASON

ithe limitations of reasonable systems

When we approach the writings of Madame Blavatsky in a
spirit of research, we are at once involved in certain difficulties.
There is, of course, a kind of research, of a historical
and editorial nature, which can be pursued with respect to her writings just as
it can be applied to anybody else's. But it is when we treat the writings
themselves as a field of information that difficulties arise, difficulties that
are baffling to a systematic mind.
Whenever a writer leaves behind him an impressive body
of work which deals with the nature and meaning and purpose of the universe, an
effort is nearly always subsequently made to draw together and summarize his
ideas and present them as a 'system of thought'. And if that writer of the past
is a really great thinker the effort is nearly always a failure.
To take an outstanding example—one might almost
say a notorious example—good and earnest and learned men have been trying
for over two thousand years to expound Plato's 'system of thought'; and they
have never, for all their poetry and wit, produced an altogether convincing and
satisfying description of that 'system'. For Plato's work displays great
flashes of insight, each illuminating a broad field of human experience or
speculation, and each embodied in a powerful phrase or a striking image, but not
apparently capable of being fitted together into a shapely and coherent system
of thought. The pieces have never really been made to fit. And this very fact,
so baffling to systematic thinkers who have come afterwards and have sought to
make Plato tidy, is what preserves for us Plato's perpetual freshness and
retains for his work a certain evasive and unpredictable vitality and beauty.
The explanation of this difficulty would seen to be, not
that Plato was an inconsistent person who contradicted himself, but that in some
fashion his stature outpassed the level and limits of merely systematic
thinking. If we could ascend to that stature and look out with the sane eye
upon the fields of discourse with which he was concerned, we should doubtless
see the complete and coherent harmony of his thought, see life made shapely
through the lens of his temperament; but we should not necessarily be able to
express in systematic terms what we thus perceived.
In fact there are certain works which have an esoteric
content. They are written, partly at least, from a point of view which cannot
be systematically expressed within the limits of language as language has so far
evolved. They contain something which is not amenable to systematic explanation
or exposition or examination.
Madame Blavatsky's work certainly presents difficulties
of this kind.
In her case, indeed, the difficulties are both heightened and
concealed by the fact that a great part of her work was concerned with subjects
which do have a somewhat systematic character, such as the phases and
developments of an ordered universe or the planned succession of races upon a
hierarchically governed planet or the principles which all human nature has in
common. Any orderly treatments of such subjects can easily lead us to imagine
that everything is far more systematic than it was her intention to imply.
One who knew Madame Blavatsky wrote of her that she 'saw many
things for herself, but her mind, worked somewhat differently from ours. If one
may say it with respect and reverence, it was of an Atlantean type in that it
massed together vast accumulations of facts but did not make much effort at
arranging them. Swami T. Sub Ro said that The Secret Doctrine was a heap of
precious stones. There is no question that they are precious stones, but one
must classify them for oneself; she did not attempt to do that for us, for she
did not feel the need of it at all'.1
Students of Madame Blavatsky's work might certainly seem to
find there a positive bias against more tidily systematic approach to any
subject; and often that seeming bias must have had a purpose. Thus, in choosing
from eastern cultures an idiom through which to express universal teachings, she
drew much, so far as Hindu tradition was concerned, upon the Tantra rather than
upon some of those Indian philosophical schools which seem more appealing and
less baffling to the systematic western mind; and, so far as Buddhism was
concerned, she drew upon northern or Mahayana Buddhism rather than upon the more
defined and tidy southern Theravada tradition which is now becoming so popular
in the west.2
Much literature in the theosophical movement since her day has
attempted to systematize still further the subjects with which she dealt. Even
she herself used tables and diagrams. Nevertheless she was in constant revolt
against the possibility that the study of her works should lead to people
stopping short at the gratifying possession of a tidy system. She kept
declaring that the numbering was not in the correct order, that the
correspondences did bot really correspond, that the half had not been told. To
put facts in tidy order was not, for her, evidence of a deep understanding. To
systematize too finely might be to put a limit, a 'ceiling' as we now say, upon
something that is innately quite a stranger to limits.
Thus, while research into Madame Blavatsky's work can, up to a
point, quite properly take the form of collating passages and bringing together
portions of systems in order to understand more fully what it is that she is
trying to describe, there is a large part of her work that needs to be
approached in rather a different way.

2process, passion and purpose

It is understandable that a great deal of the most intensive
study that is given to Madame Blavatsky's work is devoted to those portions of
it which deal with the system of things, with the processes of the universe and
the processes of man, matters capable of rational study and rational
appreciation. But a very large part of her work, and perhaps a somewhat
neglected part, deals with irrational or non-rational subjects.
It is in the non-rational aspect of life that purpose lies.
As soon as we rationalize anything and explain it, it ceases to be purpose and
becomes process. Explanation of anything involves placing it in a context or
comparing it with something else; and as soon as that is done we are no longer
concerned with purpose but with process. No matter how subtle may be the
rational description given of the underlying motive and purpose in things, we
find that, as soon as the description is given, we are concerned, not with a
purpose, but with a process, and purpose has eluded us. We may trace the
purpose of things back, layer after layer, and come finally to such an image as
'ceaseless eternal Breath which knows Itself not';3 but even that is a description
of process, and we are left wondering what the purpose is and why the Breath
breathes.
It is this same problem of purpose in human life which has led
to a long series of philosophers, from Hume to our own times, to declare that
reason is and ought to be 'the slave of the passions'.4 The word
'passions' is not, of course, intended in this connection to have any adverse
implications. It does not refer to evil passions. It refers simply to something
beyond reason or apart from reason. Reason is concerned with means, or, as we
have already expressed it, with process; but reason cannot be used to describe
the end and purpose of life, for reason does not contain that end and purpose an
is not its source. As soon as we attempt to give a rational description of the
end and purpose, we find that it has eluded us and that we are still describing,
not purpose, but only its expression in terms of means and of process.
We may certainly have discovered a deeper layer of process and
may have done something well worth doing; but we have not described purpose.
Again and again the rational mind receives intimations that, underlying the
world which it can examine and describe, there is something deeper, something
which is beyond its power to comprehend and which yet alone gives purpose to the
whole life process which the mind surveys.
Perhaps an awareness of purpose may come to us as an
intimation; but it does not come as an explanation. Sometimes, perhaps, an
intimation comes to us, riding, as it were, upon the back of an explanation; but
it does not come caged inside the rational meaning of the explanation.

3our changing attitude to the non-rational

The most read part of Madame Blavatsky's work, particularly in
the The Secret Doctrine, is, of course, an account of man and the
universe. It is an account which can be studied in a rational manner, which can
be classified and systematized and explained, an account of process.
But there is also a large part of her work which is concerned
with the irrational or non-rational element in life, the element in which the
quest for purpose may begin. In the first instance, that non-rational material
with which she deals is mythology. A very large part of The Secret
Doctrine, like its predecessor Isis Unveiled, is concerned with
mythology and legends and folklore, material that is brought into being and
given shape by the emotive and non-rational side of human nature.
At the rational level, we can discover a great deal about this
mythic element, because, although it is not itself rational or systematic, it
leaves a deep imprint of its pattern upon nearly everything with which the mind
has to deal. The study of pattern is the way in which, at the present day, the
rational mind is trying to understand the non-rational part of human nature. It
is through pattern that intellect is trying to understand the nature of love and
passion and all the lyrical side of life.
In Madame Blavatsky's day this study of the non-rational
pattern in life had not yet been given much attention. The world of intellect
was dominated by a bleak rationalism which examined the mechanisms of nature in
a largely materialistic and utilitarian spirit. The non-rational forces of
human nature were, to say the least, generally treated with condescension rather
than with respect. But today the world of intellect tends more and more to see
nature in terms of organisms rather than of mechanisms; and, since it is being
increasingly recognized that human beings are themselves organisms rather than
mechanisms, there is a certain responsive sympathy shown towards all organic
behaviour. Above all, the non-rational forces of human nature are being
accorded an increasing appreciation and dignity. The pattern which that non-
rational side of our nature males is being made the subject of patient and
sympathetic research, particularly in the fields of social studies and
psychology.The Secret Doctrine was first published in 1888, and it
had been preceded, as a study of mythology and the non-rational, by Isis
Unveiled in 1877. Almost coinciding in time with the production of Madame
Blavatsky's monumental work, there appeared in 1890 the first of many successive
editions of another great work dealing with mythology and the non-rational side
of social behaviour, The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer. About the
same time Freud was occupied with his first investigations into what we might
call the private mythologies of individuals; and in 1895 he published, with his
collaborator Breuer, Studies in Hysteria, which is generally regarded as
the first great work in the literature of psycho-analysis.
We can see in these, and in some other events at that time,
signs of the dawning of a new attitude in the intellectual west towards the
irrational or the non-rational. In medieval times, and even in Renaissance
times, the mythic side of life, the non-rational side, was accepted as dominant
and right, to be met with faith and submission. Reason could be lawfully
exercised only within the limits established by the myth, and the noblest
exercise of reason was in justification of the myth. But with the coming of the
Baconian attitude towards science, the establishment of the Royal Society, and
other developments in the seventeenth century, there came an 'Age of Reason',
when myth was pushed aside and thoughtful people tried to conduct their lives
and their work on principles of reason.
That was, of course, a very great achievement; but it was not
enough. The Age of Reason was notoriously the age of the great eccentrics, or,
as we should now say, the age of the great neurotics. Reason alone did not
provide adequate purpose for a happy life; and the non-rational element,
deprived of the outlets which it had had in earlier conditions of thought and
society now thrust its powerful though unacknowledged and unwanted presence into
the tidy lives of those carefully reasonable people and produced eccentricity,
fear and sometimes insanity.
The Romantic reaction which follows had a deep influence upon
literature and the arts but very little upon men of science, and it was only
towards the close of the nineteenth century that they began to take the first
step in acknowledging the non-rational or mythic element in life and treating it
as a proper subject for serious research. It was a first step towards healing a
split in our culture between mind and heart, though it had been a necessary and
useful split.
Since that time, while we continue to try to remain firmly
established in the rational side of our lives, we have come to regard the non-
rational, the myths, the lyrical, with sympathy and warmth, not as a mere field
of research, but also as a healthy and necessary aspect of a complete human
life.
It is probable that this transition of values and sympathies,
which can be traced in the history of western thought, can also be found to have
taken place in the individual lives of many people both inside and outside the
Theosophical Society. For example, the biography of Annie Besant, very much the
child of her age as well as of the ages, shows just the same phases - first an
acceptance of myth and the subordination of reason to it, then the assertion of
reason and the rejection of myth, and then a rediscovery of myth and a
reconciliation of reason and myth achieved in her case through theosophy. A
rather similar succession of experiences probably occurs in a good many people's
lives, on their way towards theosophy or towards some other form of mystical
enlightenment or psychological integration.
This transition which we can see in individuals and in
contemporary society—a transition from an uncritical acceptance of the
non-rational, through a phase of more or less severely rational thinking, to
quite a new appreciation of the non-rational—is an epitome, within a small
cycle, of a transition which is achieved in much vaster cycles and perhaps in
some fashion in the whole cycle of universal existence. As an individual
experience it certainly casts much light upon the place of reason in human
evolution.

4the interpretation of myth

On the principle that purpose cannot be discovered in those
processes which can be systematically examined by the rational mind, but must
rather be sought in intimations which take their rise outside the rational and
outside the systematic, there opens out a wide and almost unexplored field of
research for students of Madame Blavatsky's work. It is possible here to
summarize only briefly some general features of her treatment of the mythic and
non-rational side of life.
Myth, folklore, the stories of gods and goddesses—all
this kind of material is interpreted in The Secret Doctrine as a pattern
formed by creative, motive and emotive forces. It is a symbolic record of the
relationships and movements of the creative and motivating forces at work in the
universe; and it is at the same time also a record of the motivating forces in
individual man. For there is an intimate correspondence between the principles
in the universe and the principles in man.
Again and again it is asserted in The Secret Doctrine
that 'man is the microcosm of the universe' and that 'as above so
below'.5 As the image of the sun is reflected in myriads of
dewdrops, so is the nature of universal Reality reflected in the natures of the
myriads of humanity. Indeed, from a certain point of view, no such simile can
ever be adequate; for in a mysterious way the One is the many and many are the
One, and the principles, whether regarded as universal or as human, are
identical. On the one hand Madame Blavatsky wrote that the Logos or Demiurge is
'the qualitative compound of a multitude of Creators or Builders',6
thus implying that in Its creative aspect the One is many: and on the other hand
she wrote of the spiritual Monad as 'One, Universal, Boundless and Impartite,
whose Rays, nevertheless, form what we, in our ignorance, call the "Individual
Monads" of men',7 thus asserting that the many are One.
It is this assertion of underlying unity which makes Madame
Blavatsky's treatment of mythology quite different from that of other writers
contemporary with her. Frazer, for example, traced a certain pattern of social
behaviour and myth to a common ground of ignorance and to primitive associations
of ideas on the subject of fertility and sacrifice. A similar blend of craving,
instinct and groping ignorance seemed to produce the same pattern of behaviour
in different widely separate parts of the world. And Freud found a similar
common ground for a pattern of irrational behaviour in the inability of
individuals to outgrow an orientation towards the sexual objectives of infancy.
For Freud and Frazer alike, the pattern of behaviour and myth gained its
universal character only from the similarity of vast numbers of more or less
identical individuals. But for Madame Blavatsky myth was universal because it
was grounded in that one transcendent Unity in whose image all individuals are
made and of which each is a microcosm.
In dealing with the fluidic, non-rational, motivating element
in human life, Madame Blavatsky was concerned with something that invites us to
a splendid future, something that brings us perpetual intimations of unlimited
powers latent in man, something that is indicated to us, in scripture and
tradition, by a mythology of transcendence.
And her contemporaries, such as Frazer and Freud, in seeking
also to interpret the fluidic, non-rational, motivating element in human life,
were concerned with something that comes from a primitive and even animal past,
something that gives us perpetual reminders of the rather squalid limitations of
human intelligence, something that is indicated to us by a mythology of
primitive instinct.
But there is this further difference between Madame Blavatsky
and her contemporaries. She included their field of interpretation, and they
did not include hers. She admitted the existence of that primitive and
instinctual basis for human motivation and mythology with which they were
concerned, while they did not concede the transcendent basis with which she was
concerned. She included the essential features of their findings in her more
comprehensive view of nature and the meaning of life. They did not include her
conception in theirs, for the omission they are not, of course, in any way to be
blamed, for they were writing with methods and objectives quite different from
hers.

5instinct and intuition

Madame Blavatsky dealt really with two mythologies, a
transcendent and intuitive mythology of our future and a primitive and
instinctual mythology of our past. And those two mythologies to a large extent
employ the same symbols. As she showed, a particular popular myth in nearly any
country or tradition could be interpreted in its transcendent sense as a
revelation of the most exalted potentialities of active creative intelligence in
man and nature, or it could be interpreted as a revelation of the reactive
cravings and esurient instincts of animal man.
In fact it is as if in dwelling here in our little rational
world, we are beset from two directions by the forces of the great non-rational
outside universe. Out of our past come the forces of instinct. Out of our
future come the forces of what we may call intuition. Both are non-rational,
but in a very different way.
The instinctive promptings are non-rational, in that they just
do not take account of the rational mind. They are sub-rational. The intuitive
promptings are non-rational in that they comprehend the rational mind within
something larger than itself and are not limited by it. They are supra-rational.
That is not to say that intuition does not need the rational
mind. There has to be a mind before intuition can transmute it into 'illumined
mind'. Without rational mind, as Madame Blavatsky says, 'Atma-Buddhi is
irrational on this plane and cannot act'.8 But when rational mind is
illumined by the higher intuitive non-rational, by the supra-rational, it is
enhanced and transcended.
When, however, rational mind is in thrall to the lower non-
rational, to the sub-rational, to what is called kama in The Secret
Doctrine, then it is motivated and agitated by something which is really
irrelevant to reason. The reasons presented by such a mind are only pretexts;
for it has simply been given the task of making up excuses for whatever the
reactive or instinctive sub-rational element wants to do, and it becomes an
instrument through which reverberates 'the roaring voice of the great
illusion'.9
The minds of a large part of humanity are still being operated
mainly in that way. We have constantly to distinguish between the apparently
rational acts and objective statements with which people present us and a dark
surging substratum of irrational emotive forces which underlie that apparently
reasonable surface of word and deed. Most people are hardly conscious of the
extent to which sub-rational emotive impulses rule their lives; and if this
disturbing fact is demonstrated to them it often gives rise to that typical
instinctive and sub-rational defensive reaction which we call indignation.
In practical experience it seems unlikely that we shall ever
encounter human mind entirely pure and unaffected by either kind of non-rational
prompting. In that case we should have a stationary machine without any motive
force to make it move and work. The cold, calculating and unemotional mind
which is ascribed to some of the darker figures of history is only mind
motivated by an immature or stunted or atrophied emotional nature, Often in
such a case the highly developed mind of an adult is motivated by what is really
the equivalent of the emotional nature of a self-centred small child.
A great difficulty, and, in some cases, a great trial of
integrity, lies in the fact that these two kinds of prompting from outside the
world of rational mind—instinctive and intuitive or sub-rational and
supra-rational—find expression in practically the same myths and
symbols.
The reason why the same imagery, myths and symbols can refer
either to the instinctive or to the intuitive side of nature, whether in dreams
or folklore or works of fiction or in everyday life, lies in the similarity
which is to be found between the path of forthgoing and the path of return. The
two paths in evolution can be thought of as forming two halves of a great arc
which runs from unconscious perfection, through conscious imperfection, to
conscious perfection.
The image of a rope, which is used in a well-known essay on
'Karma',10 gives a good idea of this. There, the individual existence
is compared to a rope stretching from the infinite to the infinite. At first
the rope runs with its component threads straight, level and colourless. Then
it begins to become distorted. In fact it has reached the human kingdom, the
phase of conscious imperfection. But finally, after much stress and disorder,
the rope is at last again restored to harmony; and now the threads are no longer
colourless but golden.
Holding that image in mind, we might think of the mythic
pattern of life as representing a cross section of that rope made at any place
along it. That colourless part of the rope, representing the instinctual phase
of life, or at the golden part of the rope, representing the intuitive phase.
When we encounter a symbol or a myth, in drama or in art, in
religion or in our personal lives, we have to discover whether it is evoking in
us a response from the reactive, sub-rational self of our past or from the
golden, supra-rational, intuitive self of our future.

6the goddess: an ambivalent symbol

For the sake of illustrating the ambivalent character of
symbols, we can briefly consider one very prominent symbol. Madame Blavatsky's
first important contribution to the literature of modern theosophy was a book
about a goddess. In the actual text of Isis Unveiled there is, of course,
very little mention made of the goddess; but the choice of title is significant
in the light of the task which Madame Blavatsky performed in re-interpreting the
non-rational side of life.
One of the most powerful of all symbols in mythology, art,
literature, religion, or dream life—to say nothing of everyday personal
relationships—is the symbol of a woman or goddess. We meet this symbol of the
woman in many different forms—as the distant princess for whom we long, as the
sleeping beauty who will waken at a kiss, as the lovely maiden imprisoned in a
tower in a dark forest, as a shepherdess of sheep, as a protecting mother, as a
wise old nurse, as an elfin child, as a Circe who turns men into swine, as a
goddess in armour like Athene. Sometimes we find her qualities transferred to
some other symbol not of human form. Very often that symbol is a star.
Etymologically the word 'symbol' means a throwing together, a
concentration. Sometimes people use what they call a symbol as a means of
analysis, a label or a category. For example, members of this Society sometimes
offer interpretations of works of literature, showing that such and such a
character in the story symbolizes such and such a principle of man's inner
nature.11 The compilation of stories with a deliberate view to
subsequent symbolic moralizing was a practice in certain circles in later Roman
times, and its products were caustically described by Gibbon as 'the dotage of
Platonic paganism'. But whether well done or not, such exercises in the
interpretation of the symbolic content of events or works of literature are
rather mental; and a true symbol, appreciated as such, is intensely alive, has a
powerful emotive impact, and can often become bodied forth in a living person.
Even in its more fanciful expressions, this goddess symbol can
become objectified more easily than many might imagine. For example, in many
tales of knights errant or wanderers or picaresque travelling heroes, the
traveller has a disturbing encounter with a goddess or a fairy lady or some
equivalent figure on a hillslope or mountainside. That happens very often in
quite a personal and outer and everyday fashion when people have set out upon
the path of occult aspiration. As they tread the upward path, they become
emotionally involved with somebody in such a way as to bring to the surface a
great mass of unresolved conflict in their natures; and sometimes they
disastrously fail to deal with the situation and are left, like a certain
symbolic figure in literature, 'alone and palely loitering', a failure in two
worlds, at least for the time being.
It has thus to be appreciated that real symbols are
concentrations of emotive power and not just mental concepts.
Whether we encounter the goddess in religion, in dreams, in
art or literature or in daily life, our response will be largely non-rational.
And the crucial question is whether that non-rational response is to be from the
instinctive aspect of the non-rational in us or from the intuitive. Is the
symbol going to serve as a target for possessive sub-rational craving or is it
going to serve as an inspiration and a guiding light to lead us into a more
comprehensively intuitive knowledge of the unity which underlies all this
diversity?
In some cases the symbol is presented in literature in a way
that could make either response seem appropriate. In some oriental religious
works the ambivalence with which the symbol is presented seems, to the westerner
at least, to be extreme.12 In other cases the symbol is so presented
that it would seem difficult to respond to it at a low or merely reactive level.
In The Book of the Wisdom of Solomon she figures as wisdom and 'is the
breath of the power of God and a pure influence flowing from the glory of the
Almighty; therefore can no defiled thing fall into her. For she is the
brightness of the everlasting light, The unspotted mirror of the power of God
and the image of His goodness.'
But what is significant is not so much the nobility with which
the goddess is here represented, as our attitude towards her; for, even when so
represented as to symbolize the purest wisdom and serve as the object of the
purest devotion and aspiration, the goddess—Isis, Kwan-Yin, the Star of the
Sea, or however she may be represented—could still be made the symbolic
objective of separative, reactive and selfish desire of a refined kind.

7myth and the modern crisis

Whenever she treats of myths and theological symbols, Madame
Blavatsky is keenly awake to the fact that these symbols can be given
significance either at the reactive, sub- rational and instinctual level or at
the active, intuitive and transcendent level. Nearly all her contemporaries saw
them as significant at the reactive level only.
Of course Madame Blavatsky was not alone in seeing a cosmic
and transcendent aspect to mythology. Long before her day, and in spite of the
Age of Reason, the brothers Grimm and other romantic students of folklore had
glimpsed this significance to the extent of recognizing something of the
intuitive reflected in the instinctual. Jacob Grimm had written, 'I do not
regard the fabulous as fancy, illusion and falsehood, but as downright divine
truth.… All mythologies are ultimately descended from one, true and
divine'. And the younger brother, Wilhelm, in introducing the second edition of
the famous Tales, wrote, 'What are here preserved are thoughts on the
divine and spiritual element in life, ancient belief and doctrine bodied forth,
dipped in the epic medium that evolves with the history of a
people'.13 Although less self-consciously concerned with what is
mythic, Wordsworth's interpretation of simple country people had the same idea
behind it. And today, at the level of the personal myth, many psychologists, of
whom Jung is the most eminent, see the non-rational mythic and symbolic element
in our lives as not merely a record of our reactive and instinctual past but
also as a promise of our creative and intuitive future.
Madame Blavatsky, however, developed this subject much further
than any others have done, and she was very keenly aware of the ease with which
the selfish and prudential instincts of humanity could degrade the most refined
and lofty symbols. Much of her indignation or her sardonic wit was spent on
those who were guilty of this degradation, who had given that which is holy to
the dogs.
Thus she wrote with severity of the Roman Catholic Church
because it had degraded the mythic element and the symbolism of its faith to
satisfy the instinctual possessive demand for comfort or gratification or power.
And she took a very adverse view of the Jewish influence upon Christian
theology. She often referred to Jehovah as a 'phallic' deity,14
meaning that he had been given significance at a merely reactive level. She
used the word 'phallic' in a sense very much wider than the usual dictionary
sense of that word, implying by it, not just a sexual cult, but a cult based on
the whole instinctual and reactive side of life. And it was a product of
universal and transcendent truths becoming degraded. 'Phallic worship', she
wrote, 'has developed only with the loss of the keys to the true meaning of the
symbols. It was the last and most fatal turning from the highway of truth and
divine knowledge into the side path of fiction, raised into dogma through human
falsification and hierarchic ambition.'15
Much that she wrote about the interpretation of symbols at
levels below the intuitive and the transcendental has a very important bearing
upon what is happening in our own time. In the present period of history the
Age of Reason has run its course and people are turning much more
sympathetically towards the non-rational elements in life. Part of the crisis
of this age is bound up with the question as to whether the sympathies of the
more advanced and intelligent portions of humanity can be won to an intuitive
response to the non-rational rather than to an instinctual and reactive
response. Is the non-rational, towards which we are turning, going to be the
supra-rational or merely the sub-rational? After an Age of Reason the non-rational has once more come flooding irrevocably into our lives; and we may so
respond to it that rational mind may be gradually transformed into 'illumined
mind', or we may become the reactive slaves of our past in a way likely to
produce such disasters as have never threatened humanity before.
The unrestrained play of sub-rational-forces in a human world
can be a frightening spectacle, but particularly so if the spectator is also
agitated by those same forces acting within his own personality. Perhaps our
first impulse is to want to rush out and expostulate with such a world, preach
to it, reorganise it and perhaps denounce it. But, to help the world, we have
to perform a supra-rational task—to attain within ourselves that 'windless
place' where the lamp 'flickereth not',16 whence we can, though still
personally vulnerable, survey and fully understand that play of
forces.17 It is within and through ourselves that the world is to be
changed and saved, not only by an external reorganization and the bringing of
the old forces and factors into fresh juxtapositions. And there are as many
ways of changing the world through our own natures as there are varieties of
human temperament.
One of Madame Blavatsky's great successors as a teacher in
this Society, our late President, Mr. Jinarajadasa, made it peculiarly his
business to point to art and an impersonal love of beauty as an ideal means of
transmuting the instinctual into the intuitive. In the present swing of public
feeling towards the non-rational, the reactive and sub-rational side of life has
claimed the devotion of many, even on the arts; and, in the event, the
references which another of our past Presidents, Dr. Arundale, used to make to
'black' art, 'black' music, and many other backward-facing tendencies in this
present age, seem only too fully justified.
Ceremony also is a method of transmutation and is directly
concerned with traditional symbols. But here again, while great things can be
achieved, the symbols cab also be dragged down and can become objectives of
instinctual ambition. Invoking glamorous concentrations of emotive power,
ceremonialists can easily surrender themselves to the sub-rational.
There is no method for transmuting instinct into intuition,
reactiveness into creativeness, and for passing on from rational mind to
illumined mind, which is not wholly dependent upon individual integrity.

8from rational mind to illumined mind

These contemporary problems must frequently arise in the
private lives of members of the Theosophical Society, for a turn taken in an
occult direction often cuts people off from the conventional contemporary means
to emotional fulfilment and demands an entirely new attitude towards the non-rational side of life, the lyrical side of life, if such people are neither to
become desiccated and frustrated nor to react into instinctual outlets. A
strong glowing response in terms of completely impersonal love and appreciation
is a safe non-rational response; but when this is not achieved, various problems
arise.
Often, being careful of ourselves and feeling unable to make
that positive and intuitive response, we set the rational mind and memory to act
as watchdog over the heart. This is probably not wholly avoidable; but that
method of setting the mind to limit the activity of the heart is a denial of the
truth that the heart has its reasons of which the mind can know nothing. It also
involves great tension and unhappiness and it causes ill health. It can also
break down, causing a sudden sub-rational reaction into the thraldom of the
instinctual side of life.
Another device which many people adopt for the sake of safety
in dealing with the non-rational is a form of sentimentality in which emotion is
allowed to run along parallel to strong vein of selfish prudential calculation
which keeps the emotional substantially dissociated from any kind of action in a
real human world. Sooner or later some incident usually brings about a greater
or less degree of revelation of the falsity of this.
Madame Blavatsky was a lively critic of these devices and
forms of humbug; and, even if we sometimes depend upon them as temporary
expedients, it is clearly better that all such devices should be swept away as
soon as possible by a positive response in which mind and heart are at one.
The weakness of efforts to achieve psychological stability by
methods of adjustment and of counterchecking and counterbalancing lies in the
fact that they tend to deny the splendid comprehensiveness and oneness of
intuitive vision. They divide life, which to the eye of intuition is one, into
compartments and pieces.
And here it should be said that intuition and instinct may be
convenient labels to indicate two kinds of response; but they are not themselves
opposites, the one good and the other bad.
Intuition, in Madame Blavatsky's words, 'soars above the tardy
processes of ratiocination'18 and in this sense is non-rational
or supra-rational; but it also includes and comprehends reason. It
transcends, transmutes and illumines reason and does not
obliterate it or oppose it. Similarly it includes and comprehends those
automatic processes of life which we call instinctive. It does
not obliterate them. It gives them their right place and
significance, so that they become a harmonious factor in our lives and not a
source of conflict.
In The Secret Doctrine the awakening of the illumined mind, the
higher mind, is described as the task of 'Solar Angels', who are
also referred to under various other names.19 The functioning of
instinct in our lives is ascribed to forces that are lunar. Our
problem is not just a choice between sunlight and moonlight. It is
rather a matter of giving to direct light and to reflected
light their true respective values in the whole scheme of things.
Illumined mind is not involved in a perpetual oscillation
between calculated choices. The liberation which illumination brings is
often described as 'choiceless'.

9purpose beyond symbols

So far, in this survey of the search for purpose in the non-rational realms of life, we have not gone beyond what might be called the first
layer of the non-rational world. It is the layer which can be known to reason
through the patterned imprint which it makes upon the rational world in terms of
myth and symbol. But to know Purpose itself we must go beyond myth and symbol.
The student of The Secret Doctrine will notice that that work provides a
picture of a kind of hierarchy of myths and symbols. The mythologies of many
lands and ages are surveyed and compared but, when matters closer to the heart
of purpose are being referred to, certain higher and over-riding symbols are
used, particularly those that are in the Stanzas of Dzyan. Thus, for example,
the parental functions of gods and goddesses are merged in a single
symbol—'Father-Mother'. And even among such symbols there are a few, more
comprehensive in intention, which are used here and there where certain high
peaks of purpose are to be indicated.
Is it not possible in reading some passages of the world's
great Scriptures of Purpose to bring to them more than our merely mechanically
rational minds and to enter a little into their atmosphere and their
poetry—not poetry in any sense of a formal slice out of the cake of
literature, but a poetry which may use words and yet is altogether beyond words,
a rare fragrance from those higher altitudes?
No help can be given or received by explanation or commentary.
A leap must be taken by each alone if there is to be this understanding. Behind
certain passages and symbols there is a deep that calls to deep. If we are
shallow we do not hear. But the whole message of The Secret Doctrine is that we
do not need to be shallow, that there is no limit to the depth and
comprehensiveness that lie potential behind our human nature.
In the little glimpses and intimations that we may receive of
underlying Purpose, through studies and meditations upon certain stanzas or
symbols, through communion with nature, or in other ways, there is a tremendous
austere exhilaration. Such a glimpse or intimation must have something of the
character of mystical experience. A true mystical experience is not vague and
indefinite but has an intense, knife-edge clarity, conveys a delight that is, as
it were, clean and hard and tangible in its vitality and power. For, though it
is an experience of a universal Reality, it yet finds a perfect expression
within that particular microcosm which is the life of the individual.
But we tend to shrink back; for such intimations begin to make
us aware of the awful mystery of the utter oneness of life. To us it is an
awful mystery because it is destructive of every assumption and every
relationship upon which our lives and our civilization are based in this
external world of manyness. In the presence of that mystery, all that we, as
separate beings, rely upon is gone. There is no resistance, no adversary; and
the wings of our pride flutter helplessly in a vacuum.
Yet, in shrinking back, we may discover that there is really
nothing and nowhere to shrink back to. For that Unity, that Purpose, has no
opposite. Nothing is in contrast to that Purpose or antithetical to It; nor is
It antithetical to love or reason or intuition or instinct or anything
else—though, as divisions of experience, these may well, when all is One,
cease to be as we know them.

10purity of purpose

With the extending contemporary discovery of the non-rational
in terms of pattern and with a growing appreciation of the symbolic content of
all relationships and experiences, the modern world is busy evolving new and
valuable sciences of relationship, sciences of adjustment. But may it not be
that those of us who are concerned more with things still latent and unexplained
can look beyond this to a science not of adjustment but of Purpose?
Thus, for example, when some disaster overtakes us, we strive
to solve the problem by smoothing it out through some form of adjustment; but,
if we could know that disaster, that problem, as karma, as a pure and immediate
embodiment of Purpose, there would then be a flash of recognition from this to
That, from the alone to the Alone. Fulfilment would then be our first objective,
not adjustment. Such adjustment as fulfilment might impel us to make would be
very different from the adjustment that arises from the wish to smoothe away an
immediate personal difficulty; and the solution of a problem through the
recognition and fulfilment of the ultimate purpose which it embodies would be
profound, lasting and sure.
For those who seek to know and to fulfil Purpose and who are
impatient of unreality and lack of purpose, Madame Blavatsky has recorded what
has to be done.
'Let them know at once and remember always', she wrote, 'that
true Occultism or Theosophy is the "Great Renunciation of Self", unconditionally
and absolutely, in thought as in action. It is altruism, and it throws him who
practises it out of calculation of the ranks of the living altogether. "Not for
himself but for the world he lives", as soon as he has pledged himself to the
work. Much is forgiven during the first years of probation. But no sooner is he
"accepted" than his personality must disappear, and he has to become a mere
beneficent force in Nature.'20
We are the heirs of Madame Blavatsky—not the inheritors
only of her literary relics but also of her responsibilities. What she made
available to the world has been profoundly creative, but it has also met with
responses that are merely reactive, sometimes destructively reactive. Since her
day, for example, the fair name of occultism has been brought low indeed by many
meretricious associations and abuses.
Purpose is the only true criterion of what is real theosophy.
Purpose alone displays the insignificance of futile things and reveals the true
majesty of the things that are great. Purpose alone makes occultism clean. To
know and to fulfil Purpose is the only way in which we can fulfil our trust to
Those who have shown us light.

1 C. W. Leadbeater in Talks on the Path of Occultism, p. 9032 Josephine Ransom, Madame Blavatsky the Occultist, pp. 19 and 313The Secret Doctrine (Adyar ed.), i, 92, 1254 For a modern expression of the view, cf. Bertrand Russell, Human
Society in Ethics and Politics (1954)5The Secret Doctrine, i, 2306 ibid., ii, 957 ibid., i, 2308 ibid., i, 288. Cf. also Josephine Ransom, Studies in the Secret Doctrine p. 1709The voice of the Silence, Fragment I10 Usually printed with Light on the Path11 A vivid example is Mabel Collins, The Idyll of the White
Lotus, interpreted in The Story of Sensa12 E.g., Arthur and Ellen Avalon, Hymns to the Goddess translated
from the Sanscrit, London, 191313 While the field of politics must be left as beyond the scope of
this study, it may be noted that this idea of an intuitive wisdom emerging
through the instinctive reactions of common people (summed up in the aphorism
'Vox populi vox Dei') had a large influence upon nineteenth century
liberal and democratic thinking14The Secret Doctrine, i, 71 sq., iv, 4015 ibid., i, 30816Bhagavad-Cita, tr. Annie Besant and Bhagavan Das, vi, 1917 ibid., xiv, 2318The Secret Doctrine, i, 6919ibid., iii, 9720 'Occultism versus the Occult Arts' in Practical Occultism,
Adyar, 1939, p.50 sq.